Casualties
by portmanroxsmysoxs
Summary: One injured, killed, captured, or missing in action through circumstance with an enemy. Slightly implied RHr.


**Disclaimer:** I don't own HP, duh.

**A/N:** Well, this is yet another one-shot. I just can't help myself, really, guys. I'm still working on all the other stories I promised I would, albiet slowly. Very slowly. Anyway, I just came up with this last night when I was feeling depressed. Ron and Hermoine, of course.

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"Promise you won't look."

It was meant to be a question, but it turned out being a demand. She wanted me to help her, but she never wanted me to know that she needed me.

That was perfectly alright with me, for the moment. We all had learned that independence was a trait that was immeasurable. If you could do things yourself, you didn't need other people or their help. Hermione had quite a time learning this – she was so compassionate and trusting of most people. Finding out that indifference was much easier than the pain your heart went through when you heard the friends the war took from you was heartbreaking to watch.

I nodded, seeing her shoulders drop.

Hermione, bathed in the soft glow of candles, handed me a bowl full of brownish liquid with a dirty rag in it. I watched as she limped to the door and shut it tightly, whispering a locking charm underneath her breath. She turned back to me and tried to smile, but neither of us were really in the mood.

"Sit down," I asked her gently, feeling nervous and uneasy.

Hermione – in shocking compliance – walked across the creaking boards of the bedroom and sat tenderly across the quilt on the single bed with her back to me. It was a small room. There was room for only a bed, stand, and chest. I had lived in worse conditions, for the most part, and quite liked the fact we had actual beds – not cots or the ground – to fall into a deep sleep in. Who knew when our reassignments were coming in?

I set the wooden bowl on the stand, because my hands were shaking and I didn't want her to know.

Hermione gave a sigh and began to take off the filthy cloth that was her shirt. It had been a long day. She reached up with the red fabric and cried out in pain loudly. She stayed frozen like that, unable to move.

"Here," I said, startled and before I could think of something better to say, "let me help."

Hermione, in mild frustration, reluctantly agreed with a short nod of her head. Her arms dropped instantly at her sides and she cringed. She helped me take her arms out of shirt, and let me slide it over her head. Beneath was a mountain of wrapping bandages.

I removed the bandages quite easily, as it was one long roll. Hermione jumped when my fingers hurried wobbly across her now exposed blue-and-black back. The bruise was large – encompassing her entire back and creeping over her shoulders to her chest and stomach – and had been growing for quite sometime. She had been hit with a charm a month or so ago and never quite recovered. Her shoulders began to shake when I slid the heavy fabric off and set it gently next to her shirt.

I felt strange. At twenty-four I had seen naked women before, but never Hermione. I saw her everyday, dressed in robes with a ruddy, dirty face and unclean hair. Never had I seen her so vulnerable. It felt so wrong.

Hermione shuddered when I first slid the rag across her shoulders and neck. Her shaking shoulders never stopped, and even from behind, I could tell that tears were falling silently into her lap. I dipped the cloth back into the murtlap and ran it over her neck again, slowly. She had cut off most of her hair after having some of it ripped out in an attack, and now her beautiful curls now fell limp in a pageboy cut.

I took a while sliding the rag back and forth across the hurt skin. The essence of murtlap helped some, but only in enormous amounts. It was really a shame Hermione had to spend most of her money on the healing potion – seeing as how she needed daily applicants of it. Mostly she only had Ginny soothe it, but because Ginny, Harry, and most others in the Order were out on an ambush, I was left to tend to her.

Once I reached the bottom of her back – as far as I dared to go without hearing protest, though I doubt I would've gotten any – I went back up to tend to her neck again.

I wiped the dripping cloth across her collar bone and made the motion to go back to her shoulder blades.

"Farther," she whispered, wiping at her face. She turned her head to look at me as best she could, and settled at looking at the wall. "Please."

I remembered the day Bill carried her in the hideaway we lived in back then. He laid her on the only bed in the house – taken by Lupin and Tonks for the most part, considering they owned it – and she writhed beneath my mom's fingers in pain. She cried for days on end, unable to sit or stand. It was awful. I had forced myself to leave for a few weeks to help Hagrid in the mountains with Charlie so I wouldn't have to hear her voice. I hated it, and I knew she never forgave me for leaving her.

Without waiting for a reply – as was customary for Hermione – she turned slowly to face me, her eyes downcast on her dirty fingernails. When she looked up at me, I blushed. I felt like I was doing something I shouldn't – I shouldn't have seen her in such a state of undress.

"Ron," she said quietly, in a pained voice. "I hurt so much."

I watched as the tears she had been trying to keep from me slipped down her red cheeks in rivers. She was pathetic, and I was filled with pity for her. She didn't even have the energy to lift her arms and wipe her green, shining eyes. I never should have left – I should have volunteered to do this job the day we figured the murtlap was her only help. I hated myself, and agreed to her request.

Gingerly, I dipped the cloth in the bowl again. My fingers were shaking as I awkwardly followed the bruise to her chest. It covered her entire right breast and trailed down to her belly, and tapered off below the nipple of her left breast. It was more hideous than I thought it would be, and I felt myself cringe in repugnance inside.

I felt like crying for her, but I hadn't cried for years. Not since George died, and I promised never to do it again.

I didn't like that she kept her teary gaze boring into my eyes as I continued to stroke the blemished and damaged skin. I desperately tried to avoid her trusting stare as I accidentally let the side of my hand meet the curve of her breast and jumped. She almost smiled and I felt like an idiot.

Almost an hour later, the bowl was empty and I had covered her entire back and front several times. Silently, I picked up the bandage I had left at my feet and held it to her side, wrapping it around her middle and all the way under her arms. I took her shirt and began turning it right-side out while she adjusted herself in the bandages and offered it to her once she was done.

Hermione saw this and shook her head tiredly. "No," she told me, "I prefer to sleep like this. The sheets and shirt make my skin too irritated."

I knew for a fact it didn't matter if she didn't feel comfortable in her shirt or sheets. Hermione never slept anymore – only took awakening droughts with her coffee in the early morning so she only looked like she had slept. But I had no reason to bring it up.

I simply nodded and lay the shirt across the bottom of the bed.

"I guess I'll be going then," I said to the floor, and grasped the bowl tightly in my calloused hands.

Hermione nodded and did not object when I went to the door. As I walked halfway out, she called out, "Thank you, Ron."

I turned and smiled, wishing to leave so badly I was itching.

Hermione smiled back at me, and I felt horrid. Tomorrow morning she would be aching, and by the next night unable to move again. Day after day this would happen, and I could do nothing to stop it. I would hear her cry in the middle of the night, hitting the spots that Ginny managed to somehow miss.

"Goodnight," I mumbled and turned without another look. I shut the door tightly behind me, but did not miss the sob Hermione tried to muffle as the door closed.

This war could not end soon enough.

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**A/N:** These one-shots are like a sickness, seriously. I'm not really one to write war!fics, but I'm just not in the mood to do anything else. School is long, homework is boring, and my birthday was a bust. Anyway, I have another one-shot in the works, a new chapter for Oh, the Woes of Hermione Granger, and a completley new story I have written down somewhere with multiple chapters. Just keep looking!

Love youuuu, Katie.


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